At grammar school in Gillingham, when the rest of us had to learn a poem to recite to the class, David Frost somehow got the teacher's permission to tell jokes instead. He and I played in an extracurricular football team, and after each match he would write up our (his) performance, pay for it to be typed, and distribute carbon copies among his classmates. Even though we must already have sensed, in the 1950s, that he was a rising star, I lacked the foresight to keep any of these early Frost reports.